Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
There is nothing wrong with showboating, even revelling in excellence, of being so technically adept that your brilliance shines through and keeps you at the top of your game with no one seriously challenging your crown, and yet expertise, specialised connoisseurship, is wasted if you don’t allow the soul to be seen, to be felt, to be heard beating in time with the heart.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Steve Harris at the Echo Arena, Liverpool. May 2017.
Time is never to be wasted, it can be played with, it can amuse for a while and cause mischief, holding hands with it can either leave you feeling secure and protected or experiencing the pain of being ravaged, the sharp toothed tiger of Time plunging its teeth its teeth like a vampire cat, bleeding you dry. Time should not be wasted and therefore by logic we should not go looking for those wasted years…we should and must just feel the frenzy of excitement, the emotion, the fury, the whirl of cool when a long lost band comes back and delivers pound for pound one of the finest sets on stage in thirty years.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
The daddy has been threatening to come and take pretenders to the throne to the woodshed for so long that it was beginning to feel like an empty threat. The oh so nears, the very superb last live album giving the respect the band deserve, but the studio albums setting the world on fire but not demolishing it to smithereens as they did between 1983 and 1988, now arguably Iron Maiden, with everything that has gone on behind the scenes in the intervening years, have released the best studio album of their career since Seventh Son of A Seventh Son and one that doesn’t just growl in the dark, it rages with constant delight.
The multiple choice between Megadeth, Magnum, ‘Maiden or Metallica
T-shirts, crumpled to hell, beaten, seven shades of death
inside a second hand washing machine that dribbled
four star oil and council pop with regular ease
and threatened to catch fire whenever you weren’t looking,
locked horns with
the odd bit of your own valuable
spilled blood and redeemed soul,
imprinted forever, stained but unsullied and undefeated,
that always goes well with a great pair of jeans and trainers
that none of your well-meaning friends would be seen
dead in.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Dance of Death, as album titles go, it’s a fair one to place on an album cover especially by arguably the U.K.’s leading Heavy Metal band enjoying a new renaissance with Adrian Smith and lead vocalist Bruce Dickinson back within the helm. It conjurors up thoughts of a last waltz, which thankfully will be suspended for as long as possible, of a macabre game with the Grim Reaper, or in this case the band’s long time mascot Eddie doing a plausible impression of the figure in black as if taken from a gruesome version of the film The Seventh Seal, as Death itself holds out its hand and asks you to join together.
Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
As debuts go, Bruce Dickinson’s first album with Iron Maiden, The Number Of The Beast was and still is, a huge success, a towering behemoth full of stand-out Metal songs that even after 30 years can make the hair on the back of the neck not just stand up but revel in what the band put together. To follow that up would take something monumental, something that would have to crawl out of the pit of darkness and shine a light on the group that Iron Maiden were to come.
Can Progressive Rock and Heavy Metal coexist? It may be a question that vexes the purists of either genre, in modern day crossovers everything is nearly acceptable and certainly possible but in the late 1980s two bands from opposite sides of the Atlantic embarked on producing albums that embraced the concept and rich diversity that the amalgamation of two distinct entities could bring them. Queensryche’s Operation Mindcrime would come out towards the end of April in 1988, the honour though of bringing out arguably the first Progressive Metal album would belong to Britain’s Iron Maiden with their most ambitious record at the time, the sensational Seventh Son of a Seventh Son.
Originally published by L.S. Media. August 17th 2010.
Four years may not sound like a long time but in music terms it can be an absolute eternity, especially when you have been riding high for the best part of 30 years as one of Britain’s finest metal exports.
Iron Maiden have constantly lived up to their billing, (even forgiving a few turbulent years in the late 90’s when they were in danger of becoming an irreverence) no matter what, they knew what their fans wanted and even led the way in new musical ideas.
Originally published by L.S. Media. June 7th 2011.
There can be nothing more annoying for a music enthusiast, especially one who covets every new release, every special or live album that a band may decide to put out for their “loyal fans” then when a group of such high regard as Iron Maiden put out the ever increasing compilations.
Whether it’s to cash in before the Heavy Metal behemoth’s come back to the U.K. or if it’s through a genuine need to inform their fan base of what they have achieved in the last 20 years, From Fear to Eternity does little to get the excitement and Rock juices going.
Photograph by Ian D. Hall
Originally published by L.S. Media. August 2nd 2011.
It’s been a long time coming, but Iron Maiden finally made it Great Britain at the end of the Final Frontier tour and leaving some people with mixed reactions to their gigs in cities such as Manchester and Newcastle. Some have loved that the Irons, the kings of British heavy Metal seem back on form, giving the type of show that was a pleasure to attend in the late 80’s and full of theatre and grit. Others have complained that there was an over reliance on worn out clichés, a glimpse back to a time that needs to be locked away in the dim and distant past.